It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
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But normal has always felt like a lie to me, a too tight sweater we force ourselves to wear. Normal has never been too kind to women, to children, or people of color, people mired in poverty, anyone different in anyway. Normal is good for no one, really, it is a lie we all decide to believe - after even the most cursory look, no one is actually normal; it is a plastic bag we wrap around our own heads. The first time I came cross with Joy Luck Club was back in 1998. The first year that I was in US. My friends rent this video from a local video store and we all watched it together in the lounge of our dorm. The reason for us to rent the video was purely because it was related to China. I guess we were either curious about how American sees us or we just had the need to connect with our culture.
One thing that i remembered after watching the movie was those actresses are ugly! That was how I see them as a 18 years old Chinese girl who has the same point of beauty if not the only point as the rest of the Chinese in China. We do not appreciated our narrow eyes, flat nose and round face. Now, After 16 years of living in US, I understand beauty isn't just one kind. And, I do see those actresses' beauty and they are all beautiful. Another thing that I remembered from the movie was the beautiful and interesting story line. That was one of the reasons that made strong impression on me which led me to read the novel. The novel is always better than movie. I loved the novel. It's very Chinese and very beautiful. It talks about the details of the life of the mothers and daughters, how they are so similar and different at same time, how they love and hate each other at same time and how they all struggled as a woman in different country and era. It made me think about my relationship with my mom while reading the novel. How much I love her and sometimes hate her too, how much we are different but same at some points too, how I became who I am because of her, and also because of her absence. It made me question that was it a good thing that she was psychically and emotionally absent in my life for 16 years? Would it make me a different person if she was there for me? Living without my parents definitely made me a person who I wanted to be 'cause i had the freedom to do so. But interestingly, I become a person that my parents always wanted me to be. Maybe the 16 years of absent didn't make much difference for me, maybe the first 18 years of life with them already made me who I am. All I need to do is to rediscover myself. This novel is on my top lists of must-read if you'd like to know the two different life of two generation of womanhood. It's funny, it's sad, it's mystically and it's happy. "Americans don't really look at one another when talking. They talk to their reflections. They look at others or themselves only when they think nobody is watching. So they never see how they really look. They see themselves smiling without their mouth open, or turned to the side where they cannot see their faults."
"I smile. I use my American face. That's the face American think is Chinese, the one they cannot understand. But inside i am becoming ashamed. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and i am her mother but she is not proud of me." "It's hard to keep your Chinese face in America. At the beginning, before I even arrived, I had to hide my true self. I paid an American-raised Chinese girl in peking to show me how. "In America," she said, "you cannot say you want to live there forever. If you are Chinese, you must say you admire their schools, their way of thinking. You must say you want to be a scholar and come back to teach Chinese people what you have learned." "What should I say I want to learn?" I asked. "If they ask me questions, if I cannot answer..." "Religion, you must say you want to study religion," said this smart girl. "Americans all have different ideas about religion, so there are no right and wrong answers. Say to them, I'm going for God's sake, and they will respect you." "See here, you should have a baby. Boy or girl, it doesn't matter in the United States. Neither will take care of you in your old age, isn't that true?" And we both laughed. "This was Old St.Mary's. Under the church sign, in handwritten Chinese characters, someone had added:" A Chinese Ceremony to Save Ghosts form Spiritual Unrest 7 A.M and 8:30 A.M."..........And then I saw another sign across the street. It was painted on the outside of a short building:" Save Today for Tomorrow, at Bank of America." And I thought to myself, This is where American people worship......Today that church is the same size, but where that short bank used to be, now there is a tall building, fifty stories high, where you and your husband-to-be work and look down on everybody." "Her wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into the darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything."
"Arty-tecky,"I once pronounced it to my sister-in-law. my daughter had laughed when she heard this. When she was a child, I should have slapped her more often for disrespect." "What good does it do to draw fancy buildings and then live in one that is useless? My daughter has money, but everything in her house is for looking, not even for good-looking." "All around this house I see the signs. My daughter looks but does not see. This is a house that will break into pieces." "She cried,"No Choice!No Choice!" She doesn't know. If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever."I know this, because i was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other's misery, to eat my own bitterness."
"All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way," "Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears." "A girl in China did not marry for love. She married for position.." "In the afternoon, she and I would go on long silent rides in the city, searching for a bolt of silk in a color she could not seem to name. Her unhappiness was this same way. She could not name it." "I was not too fond of crab, ever since i saw my birthday crab boiled alive, but I knew i could not refuse. That's the way Chinese mothers show they love their children, not through hugs and kisses but with stern offerings of steamed dumplings, duck's gizzards and crab."
"A girl is like a young tree," she said. "You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away. "
"Over the years, I learned to choose from the best opinions. Chinese people had Chinese opinions. American people had American opinions. And in almost every case, the American version was much better." "It was only later that I discovered there was a serious flaw with the American version. There were too many choices, so it was easy to get confused and pick the wrong thing. " "And after seeing my mother's disappointed face once again, something inside of me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hips and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night, I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink and when I saw only my face staring back--and that it would always be this ordinary face--I began to cry."
"As proof of her faith, my mother used to carry a small leatherette Bible when she went to the First Baptist Church every Sunday. But later, after my mother lost her faith in God, that leatherette Bible wound up wedged under a too-short table leg, a way for her to correct the imbalances of life. It's been there for over twenty years."
"My mother pretends that Bible isn't there. Whenever anyone asks her what it's doing there, she says, a little too loudly, "Oh, this? I forgot." But I know she sees it. My mother is not the best housekeeper in the world, and after all these years that Bible is still clean white." "When something that violent hits you, you can't help but lose your balance and fall. And after you pick yourself up, you realize you can't trust anybody to save you --not your husband, not your mother, not God. So what can you do to stop yourself from tilting and falling all over again? " "It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate." "I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation.“ |
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